Forget blowing the images up to Imax size and converting the lunging velociraptors and
T. rex into 3-D. The best reason to revive
Jurassic Park for its 20th anniversary is Jeff Goldblum.

There was a time when Goldblum was sci-fi’s “ultimate explainer,” as producer Dean Devlin
labeled him in
Independence Day.

As “chaos theory” expert Ian Malcolm, Goldblum is the
Jurassic Park skeptic in a cluster of greedy entrepreneurs and spellbound paleontologists
(played by Laura Dern and Sam Neill).

Malcolm has all the “What if things go wrong?” questions. And when they do, he utters this line:
“Boy, do I hate being right all the time!”

Jurassic Park, adapted from the Michael Crichton novel, is a horror movie wrapped in the
trappings of speculative science of the early 1990s.

What a great time for a scary movie about a tycoon (Richard Attenborough) whose efforts have
enabled him and his backers to open an island theme park where dinosaurs have been back-engineered
to life.

Not that they should have been. Things, as Malcolm predicts, will go wrong. And people, who
never walked the Earth at the same time as these beasties, are now the main item on the menu.

Steven Spielberg’s film captures the terror in thunderous approaching footsteps, in breathy
sniffs from a nose as powerful as an air compressor. The dinosaurs, impressive in their animated
actions and leathery digital texture in ’93, haven’t lost much of their moist, tactile menace in
the past two decades. The script (by Crichton and David Koepp) is still burdened with Spielberg
kids in peril and melodramatic flourishes.

But the frights still work, super-sized and turned into 3-D for your viewing and
recoiling-from-the-screen pleasure. It’s not nearly as scary on television as it is in
theaters.

If anything, science has closed the gap from the impossible to the merely improbable in the 20
years since this movie reminded us of
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Australians are close to bringing back a recently extinct
species of frog, and others are working to bring back the dodo.